December 22, 2011

The Mysterious Will

In these desperate, post-modernist times of epistemological commotion and semantic chaos, the last thing we needed was for America's Supreme Bean -- George Will -- to come along and further muddy those other things up. But this morning, perhaps only because He writes in mysterious ways, this is precisely what Will has wrought.

Let us cut to the quip. Are these two passages in urgent need of some serious hermeneutics?

The Book of Job is a piece of cake, and Abraham's willingness to disembowel his son Isaac mere child's play, compared to the interpretive efforts required of Will's cabalistic revelations of "contemporary conservatism." That would be contemporary conservatism, as in, contemporary, that is, "marked by the present time," which is to say, current.

Did you know that this conservatism is "prudent"?

Not only that, prudence, or so it is bellowed by the Mighty Will, is contemporary conservatism's central virtue. Yes, the party of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, the philosophy of Joe Walsh and Louie Gohmert, the raison d'etre of Rand Paul and Jim DeMint -- and this leaves aside the party's Scott Walkers and Rick Scotts -- that party, as ruled by its contemporary ideology, is dedicated to the virtuous proposition of ... prudence.

Will did not write that it ought to be, but that it is.

We also learn of Will's tribal "commitment to limited government": and that, we suppose in our earthly ignorance, would be the peculiar kind of limited government that, say, forever gluts the Pentagon, or tells you which variety of genitals you can touch in holy union, or what agricultural products you can smoke -- and further tells fully half the population that its body isn't really its.

But, Blasphemy! We must further suppose that that is what any disputation with, or interpretation of, Will would entail. For He has written, and we must absorb -- fundamentally, as His inexorable spawn, Newt, would say.

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The Mysterious Will

In these desperate, post-modernist times of epistemological commotion and semantic chaos, the last thing we needed was for America's Supreme Bean -- George Will -- to come along and further muddy those other things up. But this morning, perhaps only because He writes in mysterious ways, this is precisely what Will has wrought.

Let us cut to the quip. Are these two passages in urgent need of some serious hermeneutics?

The Book of Job is a piece of cake, and Abraham's willingness to disembowel his son Isaac mere child's play, compared to the interpretive efforts required of Will's cabalistic revelations of "contemporary conservatism." That would be contemporary conservatism, as in, contemporary, that is, "marked by the present time," which is to say, current.

Did you know that this conservatism is "prudent"?

Not only that, prudence, or so it is bellowed by the Mighty Will, is contemporary conservatism's central virtue. Yes, the party of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, the philosophy of Joe Walsh and Louie Gohmert, the raison d'etre of Rand Paul and Jim DeMint -- and this leaves aside the party's Scott Walkers and Rick Scotts -- that party, as ruled by its contemporary ideology, is dedicated to the virtuous proposition of ... prudence.

Will did not write that it ought to be, but that it is.

We also learn of Will's tribal "commitment to limited government": and that, we suppose in our earthly ignorance, would be the peculiar kind of limited government that, say, forever gluts the Pentagon, or tells you which variety of genitals you can touch in holy union, or what agricultural products you can smoke -- and further tells fully half the population that its body isn't really its.

But, Blasphemy! We must further suppose that that is what any disputation with, or interpretation of, Will would entail. For He has written, and we must absorb -- fundamentally, as His inexorable spawn, Newt, would say.